Network security devices protect networks from unwanted network traffic. These devices originally were single processor devices, but have taken advantage of multi-processor and multi-core processor technologies to allow concurrent processing of incoming packets. However, bottlenecks in such network security devices have arisen, including the high processor cost of making duplicate copies of an incoming packet for handling by the multiple processors or multiple cores. Making a copy of a packet is a computationally expensive operation and the simple solution of having a processor make the packet copies and forward the copies to the several processors or cores becomes computationally infeasible at high throughput rates. Thus network security devices have been unable to achieve desired throughput and concurrent processing levels.